Articles with the Tag Christianity

Guess what didn’t happen yesterday?

video, wingnuts
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It’s been incredibly annoying to have to struggle through all the coverage of one loon/conman’s (strike which is applicable) idea of when an why the world will end, all done in a jocular fashion but with a bit of whistling past the graveyard mixed in. It all makes for lazy, easy reporting and since that’s the sort of thing reporters like best, we got saturation coverage.

As an atheist this annoys me, but coming from a background of sensible protestant Christianity it offends me to see this brand of lunacy protrayed as the face of an entire religion. The socalled Rapture is a cheat, a way for people who don’t have a clue about the real meaning of their religion to get out of the hard work of being Christian. We were told in school that “the kingdom of heaven is within” and we’d have to build a new Jerusalem on Earth ourselves, rather than wait for salvation from on high. With the Rapture and everything associated with it, you can short circuit that whole tedious work of actually improving the world and get to heaven directly. It’s Christianity for wankers.

And now proper churches have to clean up the mess this particular brand of wanker left behind.

Modern Christians: martyrdom without inconvenience

Dutch politics, wingnuts
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So the police stopped a Dutch woman during a routine road safety check, asked for her licence and found out it had expired eleven years ago. When questioned, she explained she couldn’t get an extension as the new style licence, brought out in 1997 featured the symbol of the European Union, a circle of twelve stars and it’s against her religion to use this symbol. It’s unknown which bizarre sect this woman is a member of, but Dutch nieuwssite FOK thinks she may be a member of the Vrije Herbvormed Gemeente (Free Reformed Community) in Ijsselmuiden. In any case, it’s a good if extreme example of the modern Christian, who wants to be a martyr for their belief, but doesn’t want the hassle that comes with it.

In this case we have a Christian who refuses to get a new drving licence because of her beliefs, but who also refuses to stop driving. In other, more serious cases we’ve seen Christian civil servants who refused to marry gay couples but expect to keep their job, Christian pharmacists refusing to sell condoms or morning after pills but expect to keep their job, a Christian political party that discriminates against women but expects to keep its state subsidies, and so on and so forth. In all these cases these socalled Christians want to be able to force their morals on us, but not to pay the price for it. It’s the worst aspect of modern Christianity, of feeling victimised without being victimised, of not being able to see that if you make a moral chocie you have to pay the price for it.

You refuse to get a drivers licence because you dislike the symbols on it? Fine, it’s your choice. But if you do so, don’t keep driving.